Tag Archives: College Football

Lines Written a Few Feet Away from My Television As and After I Flipped Through College Football Games – My Alabama Bias Is Part of the Mix

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Every fan should invest in a laminator.

– Florida’s in trouble. They’re coach is on a short leash and they’ve got a four game stretch later this season of Georgia followed by Texas, LSU, and Ole Miss. Whatever momentum could have been gained in these early games was needed to face a month where LSU might be the easiest match up. They lost to Miami by an unredeemable amount today. There’s no silver lining and there’s no rose colored glasses or funny accents that make their future seem any less dire than it looks to me.

They’ll get a win against Samford and maybe FSU. Their four sequential games above are all losses. Texas A&M is probably a loss. Ditto Tennessee. UCF, MSU, and KY are all toss ups. I’ll be impressed if they get five wins. They could go 1-11. Meanwhile, their biology and chemistry departments continue to impress and my assessment of the football team in no way has bearing on my regard of the university as an excellent and praiseworthy center of learning and innovation; something to keep in mind when reviewing my son’s application.

Napier seems like a nice guy, but he was trouble with fans and boosters coming into the season after two seven loss years. I’m betting he doesn’t last the semester.

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Processing Loss

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Let me just say this. My next stop, you know where Lake Burton is, in north Georgia, right on the North Carolina border, Rabun County, it’s a lake, where they made Deliverance, if you ever saw the movie. That’s where I go in the summertime. That’s where I like it. That’s my next stop.
– Coach Nick Saban, Introductory Press Conference at The University of Alabama, January 4, 2007

Collette Connell went national when on January 3, 2007, she kissed newly-announced Alabama head coach Nick Saban on his arrival at the Tuscaloosa airport. She went for the mouth, but he made his name as a defensive coach and he was quick. She only got cheek. Unfortunately for Collette, the cops were quick too. They got her for a DUI later that day. Her smiling mugshot went national as well.

Before getting pulled over, she hopped around in front of a Fox 6 camera. “We ballin’! We ballin’!” she hollered. Ineloquent – sloppy really – but she spoke for a lot of people.

I think you have to live here for a while to understand how Alabamians feel about college football. Before he went national, Paul Finebaum was a local reporter and later radio personality in Birmingham. I remember listening to his show years ago during March Madness. It was down to a few teams, maybe the Elite Eight, and Paul had taken a few calls about Duke or whoever was expected to win it all. The next caller up started full of vinegar with, “I thought this was supposed to be a sports show, Paul! All this basketball and tournament nonsense and you ain’t said nothing about football. Spring practice started today!” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He meant it. I was nodding along as I drove, but I’ve had early summer arguments about who should be the backup free safety so what he said made sense to me.

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Thanks, Jimbo. Money’s on the Nightstand.

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

After the disappointing Sumlin administration, Texas A&M decided it so loved Jimbo Fisher they paid Florida State $7 million to disentangle him from that university so they could entangle him with a ten-year contract worth $75 million of their own. After holding par for two years with the 8-5 – plus or minus one – rut A&M nurtured into a comfortable groove, Fisher led the Aggies to a remarkable 9-1 2020 record in the all-SEC schedule gauntlet COVID year. The powers that be decided they loved Jimbo $1.5 million a year more that day than yesterday. A Gene Stallings-less (I maintain he would have known better) Board of Regents upped the contract to ninety-five point six million dollars effective January I, 2022.

It didn’t work out. Winning became a problem, but under Fisher A&M was able to assemble talent. So much so that Lane Kiffin, college football’s equivalent of the intellectual dark web, pointed out how great recruiting classes were at A&M while making sure to hint that Fisher’s done less with more and, in this age when buying players is a-okay as long as you have a plausible money laundering Name, Image, and Likeness story handy, that it was cash and not the coach that brought the five stars to College Station.

“I don’t know how you collect much better. So, congratulations to their group that collected these guys,” Kiffin said at a press conference the Monday before playing Fisher and A&M. Kiffin is good at twisting knives. Blake Toppmeyer wrote in USA Today last week, “Just when I thought Kiffin might be finished dunking on Fisher, he hung on the rim.” After the “collected” comment, someone asked the Ole Miss coach if the team or fans might rally around a coach having a rough time of it.

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New Post Over at the Rah! Rah! Football! Site

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I’ve been delinquent around these parts. I’m hoping to get back on some sort of schedule, but until then, here’s a bit I did over at rollbamaroll.com about what’s happening to my beloved college football.

I really don’t understand. College football will tell you that their sport is the most exciting in the world, and they are right. Every game matters. The regular season is just as much a part of a championship campaign as any post season play. But then they turn around and do all the can to diminish the regular season with calls for expanding the playoffs.

They’ll tell you that college football is the only team sport without a playoff (not true, but they will tell you that.) Oddly they draw the conclusion that college football needs a playoff to emulate the less exciting games rather than that the less exciting games should emulate college football and ditch the extended post season.

Now the Name, Image, and Likeness rules are going to wreck the whole damn thing. Dammit.

Like I said, I’ll be back on these pages soon. I’m reading some really horrible books and I have opinions on t-shirts too.